Bugs found in Safari for Windows ... already

Security researchers have found vulnerabilities in the Safari for Windows beta just hours after Apple released it. These include at least three that could let attackers grab complete control of the PC.

Gregg Keizer, Computerworld
June 13, 2007

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Security researchers have found vulnerabilities in the Safari for Windows beta just hours after Apple released it. These include at least three that could let attackers grab complete control of the PC.

Two of the researchers blamed Apple's "false claims" about security and what they called its "hostile attitude" toward bug finders for the rush to dig up flaws.

First off the mark was David Maynor of Errata Security, who posted notice of a bug about two hours after Apple made Safari 3 available for Windows. By the end of the day, Maynor had racked up six bugs. Four could be exploited to crash the browser and/or PC in a denial of service; the other two, Maynor claimed, were remote execution vulnerabilities.

Maynor, who clashed with Apple over a demonstration of a wireless hack on a MacBook at last summer's Black Hat security conference, didn't hesitate to take at the company. "I can't speak for anybody else, but the bugs found in the beta copy of Safari on Windows work on the production copy on OS X as well," he said in a posting on the Errata site. "The exploit is robust mostly thanks to the lack of any kind of advanced security features in [Mac] OS X."

Shortly after Maynor posted his first bugs, Aviv Raff, an Israeli security researcher noted for his contributions to last July's "Month of Browser Bugs" project, announced he had found a flaw, too. "I found it using a fuzzer tool, Hamachi, that was developed by HD Moore and I," said Raff. "This is a memory corruption vulnerability, which is potentially exploitable for remote code execution."

He laid part of the blame on Apple's inexperience in writing code for Windows. "On OS X, Apple has enjoyed the same luxury and the same curse as Internet Explorer has had on Windows, namely intimate operating system knowledge," said Larholm. "The integration with the original operating system is tightly defined, but [that] knowledge is crippled when the software is released on other systems and mistakes and mishaps occur.

"[For example] you can still find references to the OS X proprietary URL protocols "open-help-anchor:" and "network-diagnostics:" inside the resource files for the Windows release [of Safari]."